Holly Johnston

More information on Holly Johnston:

Holly Johnston was born in South Korea and has lived in the United States since her adoption at the age of four. Spending most of her life preoccupied with physical play, she is now the artistic director of Holly Johnston | LEDGES AND BONES [LAB]. LAB is a collection of contemporary dance artists collaborating to create original choreography through a rigorous process of improvisation, experimentation and repetition. Johnston was selected by Dance Magazine as one of their " 25 to Watch" in 2007 for her "fearless and fluid" (Dance Magazine) approach to choreography. She is a performer, choreographer and movement educator holding a BA in Dance from Loyola Marymount University. She emerges from a career as a dancer using her passionate performance style and her relentless drive for movement invention to create work as an independent choreographer alongside her company of dancers living and working in both Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Artist Statement:

When the membrane between the inner world and the outer world broke and the life waters flooded outward and I entered into the world made only of flesh, guts, bone and spirit. I left the dreamworld, entered into the world of the tangible and in this, my art began.

What is the aesthetic of my work? I suppose in answering this I wonder how might my work appear…how might my work appear in the eyes of others? This is difficult to answer because i do not know how my work appears to others. I can simply only know my work as it appears to me through my flesh, through my spirited heart, and the marrow of my bones. Some might say that my work falls into the boundaries a Contemporary dance aesthetics, although I might suggest that my work travels through contemporary dance and frequently crosses borders between dance as aesthetic and dance as a manifestation of images, perceptions, sensations from realms of the intangible brought into animation through human movement and kinetic expressions.

Our process is collaborative and cooperative. We combine dance, sound design, technology and lighting design to make choreography that articulates our desire to coexist, with dignity for all human beings, in a culture of social and political chaos. We experience dance as an expansion of empathy and our capacity to care more about all human life. As a person who spends most of life feeling confused about how the world works and why human beings are the way they are, I have used to my dancing and choreography as a means and mode of expanding these curiosities. I am hungry for knowledge. I am thirsty for information. My wonder feels unquenchable, and my belly of questions endlessly growls.